05.28.07
Maple bourbon BBQ sauce
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
This sweet, savory, and spicy recipe can be made up to a week in advance to allow the flavors to blend, however it still tastes great even if you throw it together at the last minute.
Maple Bourbon BBQ Sauce
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 large onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp dry hot mustard
2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
2 tsp paprika
1 cup chili sauce
1/2 cup bourbon
1/3 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup red wine vinegarIn a large fry pan over medium heat, heat oil and saute onion and garlic until translucent. Add salt, mustard, parsley and paprika and simmer for 5 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer on low for 30 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool, then puree in blender until smooth. Use immediately, or store in refrigerator for up to a week.
Another batch of the chile-garlic paste
I find that I use this in almost everything, and with each batch it gets easier to make—and I make more. The current batch is two cups—i.e., a pint—and that should last me a while. Great stuff. I have now a great selection of peppers to use in making it, and can readily replenish my stash whenever I want.
Even the Right thinks right-wing bloggers are nuts
And the reason they think that? Because right-wing bloggers are nuts. Glenn Greenwald gives a detailed example of the level of argument one encounters should one be so unwary as to wade into the right-wing blogosphere.
Goodling as a girly girl
Goodling worked hard to portray herself as a sweet little innocent girl among all the big strong men in the Justice Department. From Slate:
Monica Goodling and the “girl” card: Nobody seems to want to go there, so we will.
Let’s pretend for a moment that the world divides into two types of women: the soft, shy, girly kind who live to serve and the brash, aggressive feminists who live to emasculate. Not our paradigm, but one that’s more alive than dead.
When she was White House liaison in Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department, Monica Goodling, 33, had the power to hire and fire seasoned government lawyers who had taken the bar when she was still carrying around a plastic Hello Kitty purse. Goodling, in fact, described herself as a “type-A woman” who blocked the promotion of another type-A woman basically because the office couldn’t tolerate infighting between two strong women. (“I’m not just partisan! I’m sexist, too!”) That move sounds pretty grown-up and steely. Yet in her testimony this week before the House judiciary committee, Goodling turned herself back into a little girl, and it’s worth pointing out that the tactic worked brilliantly.
Look past Goodling’s long, silky blond hair, which may or may not have been a distraction. She’s entitled to have pretty hair. Look past her trembling hand as she swore her oath and the tremulous voice as she described her “family” at Justice. What really shot Goodling into the stratosphere of baby-doll girls were her own whispered words: “At heart,” she testified, “I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way.” [Late-breaking discovery, courtesy of a sharp reader: Goodling used the word girl in the written rather than spoken version of her testimony.] The idea, of course, was to scrub away her past image as ruthless, power-mad, and zealously Christian. But—as professor Sandy Levinson noted almost immediately over at Balkinization—it was in calling herself a “girl” that the 33-year-old did herself a great favor. It was a signal to the committee that she was no Kyle Sampson. Or Anita Hill.
Balancing risks
Glenn Greenwald makes the point that, before the US invaded Iraq, we were treated to a smörgåsbord of risks attendant upon not invading, but nowhere in sight (in the major media) was a display of risks if we did invade. Howard Dean was alone in making of point of looking at the risks that came with the invasion—and those risks have been realized.
And now we get long lists of risks of withdrawing from Iraq, and nothing at all about the risks of remaining in Iraq. Read his column.
Sophie figures it out
Sophie in her new bed. This bed formerly was Megs’s, but Megs never could figure out that the idea was to get into it. So it went to Sophie, whose first response (of course) was to sniff it. Then she grabbed the lining to pull it out, and knocked the thing over on its side. Sophie always thinks that establishing dominance is an important early step, so after some sniffing, she beats up a new object. Eventually, though, she figured out that she could get into it, curl up, and get warm—and she figured that out in a matter of hours. Now: does this mean that Sophie is smarter than Megs?
Yes.
The brain, evolved for altruism
This is interesting, and it raises the question of whether some of those who see nothing wrong with torture and the like might simply be brain-damaged.
…Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
…The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.
Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results — many of them published just in recent months — are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.
No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe’s head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.
What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots — such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman’s experiment — that have been around for a very long time.
The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize — even experience vicariously — what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.
The DHS is an extension of the Immigration Service
The DHS is, oddly enough, not focused at all on terrorism. From ignoring the threats from, say, containerized shipments, to focusing on illegal immigrants, the DHS is living up to its Katrina-response image. From CNN:
Claims of terrorism represented less than 0.01 percent of charges filed in recent years in immigration courts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a report issued Sunday by an independent research group.
This comes despite the fact the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that fighting terrorism is the central mission of DHS.
The Transactional Records Action Clearinghouse said it analyzed millions of previously undisclosed records obtained from the immigration courts under the Freedom of Information Act.
Of the 814,073 people charged by DHS in immigration courts during the past three years, 12 faced charges of terrorism, TRAC said.
Those 12 cases represent 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed.
“The DHS claims it is focused on terrorism. Well that’s just not true,” said David Burnham, a TRAC spokesman. “Either there’s no terrorism, or they’re terrible at catching them. Either way it’s bad for all of us.”
The TRAC analysis also found that DHS filed a minuscule number of what are called “national security” charges against people in the immigration courts. The report stated that 114, or 0.014 percent of the total of roughly 800,000 individuals charged were charged with national security violations.
TRAC reported more than 85 percent of the charges involved more common immigration violations such as not having a valid immigrant visa, overstaying a student visa or entering the United States without an inspection.
According to the report by TRAC, which is affiliated with Syracuse University, the results show that there is an “apparent gap between DHS rhetoric about its role in fighting terrorism and what it actually has been doing.”
More open comb
More on the “coat hanger profile”, which puts a gap between the razor’s edge and the comb, as opposed to the old Gillette and modern Merkur practice of placing the edge directly on the comb. When you look at the end of the razor platform and top, the platform has a “coat hanger profile,” which dips slightly at the edges. In this Gillette NEW, the platform of which is at the top of the above photo, the profile is accentuated by grinding away a little of the platform at the (visible) ends. (In other Gillette NEW models, no grinding, and the teeth are longer and turned down at the ends.) But the Aristocrat pictured below the NEW has the same effect—raising the razor’s edge above the comb—though it’s “coat hanger” shape is not accentuated with the grinding.
I used an Aristocrat open-comb model this morning, with a new Feather blade. Great shave. The soap was a D.R. Harris Marlborough shaving stick, and I got an excellent lather with the little Emperor 1 Super—a small brush, but a real worker, and it holds plenty for three passes. The aftershave was also D.R. Harris Marlborough. Exquisitely smooth face.
